Tribeca's Secret Subway

By Oliver E. Allen

Although New York over the winter celebrated the 100th birthday of its subway system, the subway we know today was not actually the city’s first. An experimental underground line was built a full 30 years before 1904 by an inventor and magazine editor named Alfred Ely Beach, who accomplished the feat here in Tribeca—underneath Broadway across from City Hall. What’s more, he did it on the sly. Few people knew what he was up to until he was ready to unveil his unlikely device.

The way Beach figured it, the best way to move people underground was to put them in capsules and blow them from place to place by means of huge fans. The idea was not new. Back around 1800 a Danish engineer had suggested moving goods or even people by air pressure, and in 1805 a Briton named George Medhurst proposed mounting a wooden shield on the end of a railroad car that would enable it to be blown through a brick-lined tunnel using wind from a pumping apparatus. Unfortunately, no pump strong enough to do the job existed.

But as the nineteenth century progressed and cities rapidly grew, the need for underground transportation became critical. London in 1863 inaugurated a subway system using coke-burning steam locomotives that supposedly condensed their exhaust in special tanks mounted under the boiler, and most of the tunnels were short, allowing the engines to blow off excess steam through open-air cuts. The arrangement was obviously flawed, and in any case it was not feasible in New York where there was no room for cuts. An entirely different system had also been tried in the 1860s in London, however, by which mail and parcels in small cars were pneumatically propelled from a railway station to a post office through a three-foot-high tube.

People could even wedge themselves into the cars by assuming “the recumbent posture enforced by circumstances,” as one commentator said,  and they could travel the two-mile distance in five minutes. The contraption worked, and when Alfred Beach heard about it (through his contacts as editor of the journal Scientific American) he immediately saw its potential for use in New York City.

“A tube, a car, a revolving fan!” he cried. “Little more is required. The ponderous locomotive, with its various appurtenances, is dispensed with, and the light aerial fluid that we breathe is the substituted motor.”

To showcase the idea at an 1867 trade fair in New York, Beach constructed a wooden tube six feet in diameter and one block long, suspended from the ceiling and containing a car that could seat 10 persons and was propelled by a huge fan. Several thousand people took the ride and were enchanted, and Beach declared that passengers using such a “through city tube” could travel from City Hall to Central Park in eight minutes, or under the East River to Brooklyn in just two. He resolved to build just such a line.

Great caution was needed, however. Another man had already applied to the state legislature for permission to build a pneumatic subway and had been turned down: a line carrying people was considered too risky. So Beach—as described in Joseph Brennan’s book “Beach Pneumatic,” which is available on the Internet at www.columbia,edu/~brennan/beach— applied for the right to construct a four-foot-wide, underground mail-carrying tube from Warren Street to the city post office on Cedar Street, roughly half a mile away.

Actually it would be two parallel tubes, he said. Suspecting nothing, the state gave its OK. Then Beach said he wanted to enclose the two ducts in a larger tube eight feet in diameter. OK again.

Beach rented the basement of a store on the southwest corner of Broadway and Warren Street and set about enlarging it.

Then he commenced digging his tunnel with an English device that he had adapted; it chewed away the earth in 16-inch gulps, using hydraulic rams powered by a water pump. The tunnel headed east under Warren Street and then turned south under Broadway one block to Murray Street. No one paid much attention—it was all happening underground where no one could see it, and dirt was brought to the street at night when the area was deserted. The New York Tribune carried stories about the novel mail-carrying project, but its editors hardly suspected that it would handle people.

Costing $350,000, Beach’s line opened for public viewing in February 1870. Visitors descended from the store to find a 120-foot-long waiting room complete with a fountain stocked with goldfish, pictures on the walls and a grand piano. In a neighboring room they could inspect a 21-foot-tall air pump called the Great Aeolor, which could discharge 100,000 cubic feet of air every minute to propel Beach’s subway car. Descending further, visitors arrived at the loading platform and saw the entrance to the tunnel, above which were engraved the words PNEUMATIC (1870) TRANSIT, and the tubular subway car, furnished with cushioned seats and gaslights.

If they felt adventurous enough they could enter the car and take a ride. When the door was closed and everyone was seated, there was a rush of air from the Great Aeolor and the car was “carried along just like a sail-boat before the wind,” one passenger reported. As it approached the end of the tunnel its wheels touched a trip-wire that rang a bell prompting an engineer to convert the Aeolor from a pusher to a puller; the car slowed to a stop and then was gently pulled back to Warren Street. Sometimes the conductor, as the car approached the tunnel’s end, would proclaim “Murray Street!” which invariably brought a laugh. Everyone loved it. Emboldened, Beach submitted a bill to the state legislature that would permit him to extend his line all the way up to Central Park.

Beach resubmitted it and was again turned down. In 1873, with Tweed fallen from power, he tried again and this time the bill passed and was signed it into law by a new governor.

Then outside events engulfed the project. The Panic of 1873 set in and suddenly there was no money for such a wild scheme. Beach’s Pneumatic Transit was forgotten, and the city did not get a bona fide subway until 1904. After using his space for a shooting gallery and other rent-payers for a few years, Beach reluctantly boarded it up and walked away. The tube and its car sat underground for years.

Finally in 1912 workers digging the new BMT subway line under Broadway (today’s R route) came upon Beach’s tube and, within it, the car still sitting on its tracks. Even the waiting room seemed untouched. The tunnel became the nucleus of the City Hall subway station and for a while a plaque commemorated Beach’s great experiment. But that marker somehow disappeared and today there is nothing.

Of course it can be argued, with considerable logic, that the pneumatic scheme could not have worked over a great distance.

The huge Aeolor was needed just to move the single car one block; how many blowers would have been required to move an entire train one mile, and where would they have been located? The costs and complications were surely prohibitive. Beach’s Pneumatic Transit was probably doomed. But it must have been fun to ride while it lasted.

[Home][Back][Archives] [Advertise][Contact]
The Tribeca Trib · 401 Broadway, 5th Floor · New York, NY · 10013 · 212.219.9709